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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Grutness (talk | contribs) at 11:30, 25 January 2005 (→Multiple category entries). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.


The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues. Bugs and feature requests should be made at MediaZilla: since there is no guarantee developers will read this page.

FAQ: Intermittent database lags can make new articles take some minutes to appear, and cause the watchlist, contributions, and page history/old views sometimes not show the very latest changes. This is an ongoing issue we are working on.

Details about the occasional slow speeds and deadlock errors: here

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Technical archive

Discussions older than 7 days (date of last made comment) are moved here. These dicussions will be kept archived for 7 more days. During this period the discussion can be moved to a relevant talk page if appropriate. After 7 days the discussion will be permanently removed.

New version crashing Internet Explorer

This has happened several times in the last few days since the new version was installed. I'll be editing a page, press preview and then IE crashes and I lose everything I've done. IE never died before, and it doesn't die at other sites. The only thing I've noticed as a clue to what may be happening is that there appears to an occasional "phantom" space that appears at the beginning of a line that I'm working on. If I delete the space, then IE will crash when I click on Preview. --Samuel Wantman 06:02, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

  • Not to be a dick, but it's kind-of obvious: Get Firefox. Seriously, man, you are using a ridiculously inferior browser. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 06:35, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • Agreed. IE's rendering engine is horribly standards incomplient. 68.237.137.57 00:39, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Please try not to start flamewars. And consider that he might, say, be at work, and his IT department had a "Not Invented Here" policy. IE still has the vast majority of marketshare, and websites should try to support it. crazyeddie 07:54, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

  • Well that's just something we're going to have to disagree on. Websites should support W3C web standards. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 01:07, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps so. But, assuming Sam here can't get ahold of a real webbrowser, how about trying to give him a hand? Or maybe help him give Microsoft a bug report to encourage them to stick with the standards? By all means, Sam, grab Firefox if you can. It's got a ton of features IE lacks, more secure, etc, etc. But you shouldn't have to switch just to get one website to work right. Of course, the problem is probably on MS's end, if the Wikipedia is standards compliant. By "new version", I'm guessing you mean the new version of IE? crazyeddie 01:23, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

No, I never had a problem before the new version of WIKIPEDIA. I don't believe there has been a new version of IE in the last week or so. --Samuel Wantman 09:33, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

To try and help Sam — are you possibly pasting from a text editor, or another program which generates UTF-8 (i.e. Unicode) text? Certain versions of MSIE can crash and burn if they encounter a UTF-8 BOM at the start of a page, and this may be rendered as a "phantom space". Some third-party addons for MSIE may also include UTF-8 text in all textareas. User:Anárion/sig 08:22, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It is hard to me to be certain what is causing the crashes. I don't paste from other programs.
I'm really disapointed to hear people recommending other browsers as a solution. Do we really only want people to become involved with Wikipedia if the use the "correct" browser. Think about all those students that are using the browser that is on their schools' computer, or all those new computer users that only have IE and don't know alternative exist. As much as I dislike Microsoft, I think Wikipedia MUST work as well with IE as it does with other browsers. (I hope this edit doesn't get trashed!) --Samuel Wantman 09:28, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)
BTW, I crashed after this last edit, I didn't preview. So apparently the edit got sent to Wikipedia and then crashed. I guess I'll stop using preview for a while. --Samuel Wantman 09:33, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

What version of IE? Can you give examples of articles that have caused crashes? Have you installed any other hardware or software lately? Given IE's market share, the fact no one else seems to be reporting the problem, it seems like it has to be pretty specific, not just 1.4+IE. 24.4.252.96 19:03, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC) (User:Niteowlneils not logged in)

Also, what OS/platform? I saved the above using IE--I'll switch to editing with IE to see if I can reproduce it. 24.4.252.96 19:07, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC) (me again)
So far I've made 3 preview/saves here using IE5.5/Win2K, and over a dozen other article preview/saves using Win XP/IE6, and haven't had a single crash. Seems like it's specific to your system/config. (I didn't realize how painful it is to edit Wikipedia using a browser that doesn't allow you to open links in new tabs instead of windows. YUK!)Niteowlneils 19:38, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I've done a bunch more editing with IE with no problem. How many edits until you crash might be useful. Also, do you use regularly updated anti-virus software? Niteowlneils 12:53, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Might want to do a spyware sweep also. Here's one I recommend to my customers. It's free if you're not a business. When a computer starts doing odd things, and it's a windows box, do a virus and spyware scan. Might not fix the problem, but it will at least rule that out. crazyeddie 18:41, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Interesting. I've noticed that I began having some problems with IE crashing itself out of any Wiki pages I have open when I try to preview an edit. It has only happened twice, and I'm having a tough time making a connection. I'm running EI 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158 on WinXP Pro with Service Pack 2 installed. Perhaps I'll send an error report to BillCo if it happens again. Weaponofmassinstruction 07:36, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

And then it happened a third time.... grrrr Weaponofmassinstruction 03:03, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Alright, like we were telling Sam - grab Firefox (if you can). This might bypass the problem. If that works, we can continue trying to troubleshoot the underlying problem. Then update your antivirus and anti-spyware programs and then run them, to rule out poorly written third party malware. Then see if you're still having problems with IE. Get back to us either way.

Could this be related to the server load? I've been getting a helluva lot of server error messages lately. crazyeddie 00:56, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Images in image captions

Many "flag of" pages, for example Flag of Bhutan, have a flag picture with another picture in the caption. This used to work, and is now horribly broken; I assume because of the MediaWiki upgrade. Any chance it will be fixed? Or do we now have to live with image-less captions? Dbenbenn 23:02, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

You can report software bugs at mediazilla:. —AlanBarrett 17:15, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
As it seems, it has already been reported and also fixed, but unfortunately not yet in the Wikipedia code. I really hope to see the flag articles healthy soon!  — Pt (T) 02:01, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Multiple category entries

For some reason, the article on Mount Andrus appears in Category:Mountains of Antarctica seven times, and in Category:Shield volcanoes six times. I can't see an obvious reason for the glitch, and it only appears in its other category (Volcanoes of Antarctica) once. Any ideas? Grutness|hello? 00:17, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The same problem is happening at Category:Campaigns of the Main Eastern Theater of the American Civil War. Notice the two entries under B. --brian0918™ 01:18, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Repaired. The category "article" was created twice. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:54, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
It must be a database error. I tried removing the category links and it only removed one of the duplicate entries in the category. —Mike 01:51, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)
The reason it appeared in categories multiple times is that GarciaB managed to create the article about eight times. Each creation had slightly different categorization, which is why it appeared in different categories in different quantities. Now repaired. -- Cyrius|✎ 02:01, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Could a similar problem be behind strange links with the Owen Marshall article? It only appears in categories once, but turns up twice in "What links here" lists. Grutness|hello? 05:50, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yes. Should now be repaired. -- Cyrius|✎ 06:27, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

And another one (sigh) - Brown Clee Hill. Just changed it from a geo-stub to a UK-geo-stub. It still appears 4 times in the geo-stub category, though - it should no longer be there at all. Grutness|hello? 13:41, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I tried to fix Brown Clee Hill by deleting and restoring it, but now it doesn't appear in the categories it's supposed to. I'm not sure what's wrong.-gadfium 18:56, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Is there an easy way for non-admins to fix hese things? I ask because I've found several more with similar problems; most recently, problems with Androscoggin River, Bykhov, and Fontinhas Grutness|hello? 10:21, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Fixed Fontinhas. The other two look okay to me, maybe someone else already fixed them.-gadfium 18:51, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Androscoggin River still lists in Category:Geography stubs, even though the stub message was removed from the article. Bykhov seems fine now, though - thanks to whoever fived that (and to Gadfium for fixing Fontinhas) Grutness|hello? 23:05, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Category:Birds has a subcat (Category:Columbiformes) that is listed about twenty times. --DanielCD 21:44, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Fixed. It struggled, and I lost most of the edit history. The database must be pretty sick.-gadfium 22:36, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Add another: Vällingby, listed three times as a geography stub Grutness|hello?

Fixed.-gadfium 22:09, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

There are still problems with Androscoggin River and Bykhov (both appearing in geography stubs, although they have no template), and Mosteiros (Ponta Delgada) seems to have double category entries. Grutness|hello?

Problem in article history

I just made some minor edits (changed a few typos and some spellings) in The Acharnians. The previous edit was by user:Jongarrettuk.

The article history does not show Jongarrettuk's edit, nor do I see his edit in his contributions page.

Any suggestions as to why?

M.

As it says at the top of the page:
FAQ: Intermittent database lags can make new articles take some minutes to appear, and cause the watchlist, contributions, and page history/old views sometimes not show the very latest changes. This is an ongoing issue we are working on.
Cyrius|✎ 13:35, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Maybe that warning should include a link (or at least suggestion) to Recent changes, to see if the article was created (that's what I've taken too)? Niteowlneils 23:29, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Alas, that is not what I'm reporting. My edits were posted immediately, without a problem. It is the record of the edit of the previous contributor that disappeared (and still hasn't reappeared hours later). I haven't seen this problem reported before. M.
Trust me, it's the same problem, and it's mentioned above. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:46, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I had the same problem see above: "Edit disappears from edit history". The missing edit was a recent edit but not the most recent edit. Eventually the missing edit showed up, and Cyrius assured me that this was due to the database lags mentioned in the "FAQ" referred to above. But I think the "FAQ" message could be worded more accurately, to make it clear that any recent edit(s) might be missing, rather than just the "very latest changes", since like user:Jongarrettuk, I didn't think that message described my situation. Any objection to rewording the message tp reflect this? And by the way I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Cyrius, and all the behind the scenes gnomes for working to fix these problems, as well as communicating with us about them. Paul August ☎ 05:23, Jan 7, 2005 (UTC)
Agreed. I just came here to ask about edits missing from my contributions list (not the latest edits but earlier ones, causing the contributions list to skip over the edit), and was unsure if the message at the top of the page was relevent to this problem. The message at the top makes it sound like it's only refering to the most recent edits, and so might just be due to a delay. This is clearly different, though, as more recent edits do show up. If the problems have the same cause, the message should be changed to reflect that. — Asbestos | Talk 12:41, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

categorization multiplication

I see this issue has already been raised before, but I encountered it only today: Category:University of Virginia is three times in its parent category. Each of the first coouple of times I tried to create it, I came back to the "Article X does not exist" message, and tried again. On the Wikipedia:Categories for deletion page, a couple of other examples are mentioned by different users: Category:Australian freshwater fish (mentioned under nomination of Category:Fish by nationality) is in Category:Australian fish three times, and Category:Arabic poets seemingly exists in two copies. / Tupsharru 17:22, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

'Each of the first coouple of times I tried to create it, I came back to the "Article X does not exist" message, and tried again'
Don't do this! U of Virginia category repaired -- Cyrius|✎ 19:43, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I too have noticed this issue. The article Trung Dung is listed 4 times under Category:Vietnamese Americans — J3ff 09:07, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Trung Dung fixed.-gadfium 18:32, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Spyware causing problems for editors

Today I've seen some problems caused by what seems like spyware on peoples computers. Both 172.189.29.158 and KeyserSoze have made positive edits that have had to be reverted after spurious HTML code was added into parts of the article. Fortunately MediaWiki prevents such code from working, displaying it instead. I'm thinking that the spam filter may need extension to prevent this from happening - there may be tons more editors that are trying to contribute but causing such problems. violet/riga (t) 00:28, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC) Just removed the code from the East Timor article thanks to a search for "onmouseover" at Google. There may be others but neither the inbuilt search nor Google are returning any for me at the moment. violet/riga (t) 00:38, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

If this kind of insert could be identified at edit time, it should be fairly easy to identify the offending browser config and aggregate for manual forwarding to the developers of the browser. The key is to make sure the developers are made aware and can develop a fix before too many browsers and websites are affected. Wikipedia is getting pretty huge now so we should be thinking in terms of establishing working relationships with browser (and cache) developers with a view to sharing tech fixes fast. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 00:48, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
If their contribution is part "positive", and part negative (spam, PoV, or anything else), shouldn't you edit the bad part, not revert the whole thing, Violet? You actually reverted away good contributions in order to get the apparently involuntary spam out, that seems like swatting mosquitos with a sledge hammer. Kaz 00:52, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I did re-contribute what was added by some of the edits, but the amount of crap added makes it more difficult to spot the good parts – when it's a simple punctuation edit or something like that it may be hard to find. violet/riga (t) 12:53, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Here's another example that I found and cleaned up [1] at List of villains. gK ¿? 08:13, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)
It's a piece of spamware called Hyperlinker. See http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/Hyperlinker.html for analysis. I suggest simply rejecting all edits containing links to serverlogic3.com. -- Naive cynic 02:31, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Seconded. Alternatively, someone should come up with a template message with which we can politely notify people who are infected. Rhobite 03:58, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

Broken Indo-European box

The box Template:Indo-European is broken: when I look at it in Explorer for Mac OS X, it looks like this:

So some of the links are behind others and can't be clicked. I tried to fix the box so it was usable if IE for OS X, but User:Dbachmann reverted my change because it screwed up TOCs somehow. Is anybody able to repair this? I don't know enough Wikisyntax. AJD 01:25, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This is probably not the answer you want to hear, but I'd suggest switching to another browser. IE for OS X is no longer being maintained, and has not received an update since June 2003. -- Cyrius|✎ 03:38, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Some of the subtables (ewww) were oddly floated. Because of the way it's all laid out this floating didn't actually have any effect that I could identify in other browsers (tested Safari, Firefox, and IE6/Windows) but triggers float-related bugs in IE5.2/Mac. I've removed the extra float: styles; the template now looks ok to me in IE5.2/Mac, and doesn't look different from before in the other browsers (at least to my eye). --Brion 04:07, Jan 11, 2005 (UTC)

Template subdivision spacing

For the box under Taxobox_section_subdivision; usually denoting species the box isn't space well. Could someone change the template and add spacing or unleash a bot of amazing abilities to fix it. First noticed it on the Beaver and confirmed it with the Rat. - RoyBoy [∞] 04:14, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Top Navigation Bar is Faulty in Internet Explorer

When I put move my mouse over to the top navigation bar (with preferences, my watchlist etc) in Internet Explorer, the bar, which is usually at the top right hand corner, immediately jumps to the left. Would this be some problem with the JavaScript code? I'm using IE 6 with the Monobook skin. Enochlau 05:08, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Does it jump only very slightly, Enochlau? It's a bug in Internet Explorer that can be resolved by giving the block object a margin and padding of at least 1px. –– Constafrequent (talk page) 08:21, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Don't worry. It somehow fixed itself. Thanks for the suggestion anyway.Enochlau 12:13, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)
It's a temperamental bug. :-) –– Constafrequent (talk page) 14:33, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)
As the Monobook skin (and by association, the Wikipedia site) is composed almost entirely of CSS, I would perhaps recommend that you think about switching to a CSS-compliant web browser like Mozilla Firefox or Opera. If you didn't know, Internet Explorer's rendering engine hasn't been updated in about 6 or 7 years and as such doesn't support CSS very well. :-) BLANKFAZE | (что??) 22:19, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Can you confirm whether the problem is still present? There have been some changes recently regarding IE bug workarounds, which may or may not have fixed this. --Brion 07:25, Jan 15, 2005 (UTC)
Confirmed: recent changes do seem to have fixed this. —Lowellian (talk) 21:34, Jan 17, 2005 (UTC)

Thumbnails not working

Some time during the whole server issue, I uploaded three images. Each one was a replacement of another image used in The Big Lebowski, they're DVD screencaps. The previous images had the wrong aspect ratio. Anyway the new images uploaded fine, but they aren't refreshing in the article. It seems to be a problem with the old thumbnail staying cached. Is there any way to flush out the old thumbnails and generate new ones? Rhobite 06:57, Jan 13, 2005 (UTC)

Mirror-List when Server overload occurs

I propose to extend the error message for Server overload with a Mirror List of Wikipedia. Preferably complete and up to date clones of Wikipedia. That would be much more useful for the regular reader of Wikipedia than the current Eror output.

Current Error Message on Server overload:

Sorry- we have a problem...

The wikimedia.org servers are currently overloaded, or down.

Hopefully this will be fixed soon; <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategorie:Wikipedia_Hilfe">please check back</a> in a few minutes, as the problem is most likely temporary

   To get information on what's going on you can visit <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/wikipedia">#wikipedia</a>.

    An "offsite" status page is hosted on <a href="http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Wikipedia_Status" class="external" title="http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Wikipedia Status">OpenFacts</a>.

Donations

Due to the ever-increasing number of people visiting Wikipedia and its sister Wikimedia projects, we have a constant need to buy new hardware to keep the site running. If you'd like to help, please <a href="http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising">donate</a>.

Greetings, --Leopard 19:46, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I agree, with some caveats:
  • We should only list mirrors with a high degree of compliance. Ideally, they should provide a prominent link back to the corresponding Wikipedia article, so they can easily return. They should also be consistently up-to-date.
  • They should not allow editing (otherwise our editing pool might become forked).

The donation and statistic links are also an excellent idea, though, and should stay. No better time to remind them what they can do to help. Deco 11:25, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

public watchlists?

We apparently have a new feature of "public watchlists" in 1.4, but I've been unable to find any information on how they work and how to use them. Can anyone clarify?

What I'd really ideally like is a way to structure a page so it works as a watchlist; that way I could put the articles that depress me on a list by themselves and then log on to my main watchlist without dread. I've tried making a user page of links to those articles and then checking "Related Changes", but among other things it doesn't appear to register changes to the talk pages of those articles.

Do wha-huh? I haven't heard anything about this. Perhaps you're referring to the usage of the "Related changes" link combined with a user: space subpage that people have been calling a "public watchlist". -- Cyrius|✎ 07:28, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)
[[Template:Public watchlist]] is what I'm talking about. I've spotted something that I didn't see before that may explain how it works; it looks like the page that gets the template also needs a subpage in the form "/publicwatchlist" that contains the actual links. So maybe it's not really a new feature of 1.4; it may be just coincidence that it showed up right after the change to 1.4, or maybe 1.4 introduced changes that made these easier to templatize. -- Antaeus Feldspar 20:22, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)
There is definitely no feature called a "public watchlist". --Brion 07:23, Jan 15, 2005 (UTC)

This is a hack which I believe worked before Wikimedia 1.4. As Cyrius explained above, it's just the use of the "related changes" feature. I use it, as it allows me to reduce the size of my watchlist. I have articles I'm particularly interested in in my watchlist, which is private. I have a list of community pages, which I view to keep up with what's happening on Wikipedia, in a subdirectory of my user page, and a convenient link on my user page to see what's changed in those. The only disadvantage of this scheme is that "related changes" doesn't include talk pages, so I have to list them on my "public watchlist" as well as the (mostly) wikipedia namespace pages. You're welcome to view my public watchlist on User:gadfium/watchlist. Please don't edit it, but you can always point out pages you think I should include on my talk page.-gadfium 07:42, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Well, with the realization that talk pages themselves can be added to the list of pages to check, I'm not bothered whether it's an official feature, or just a hack that works; it does what I'd hoped it would do. Thanks! -- Antaeus Feldspar 19:25, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Multi-column formatting

I note that the lists of articles on category pages are displayed in a multi-column format. I've long wanted to do this to a few "List of ..." articles, because having a long list of items take up a third of the width of the screen strikes me as unaesthetic. Is there any way to get apply multi-column styling to content other than category lists? Shimmin 22:15, Jan 13, 2005 (UTC)

I was thinking of creating a template that did that - a simple table would easily do it. It wouldn't cope with continuing # bullet numbering though. But is it against the MOS? violet/riga (t) 22:36, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Tables for this purpose are easy to use and not that uncommon. For example, list of unified school districts in Kansas. —Mike 03:05, Jan 14, 2005 (UTC)
However, doesn't this require manual rebalancing when one of the columns grows longer than the others? Perhaps we only do multi-column formatting when the contents of the list aren't going to change much over time. Enochlau 07:23, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

There is a new feature in version 1.4 which allows the display of images in galleries; this feature has been used on the facebook to great effect. However there are minimal instructions as to how to use this feature, and nothing to say what, if any, options are available. Can someone who knows augment the instructions either with the available options or to state that there are none? --Phil | Talk 09:52, Jan 14, 2005 (UTC)

To the best of my knowledge it has no options to speak of; you can put images in it, and optionally text to go beneath the image. --Brion 07:20, Jan 15, 2005 (UTC)

OK. I was hoping for some way to control the size of the images, and how many are placed on each row, that kind of thing. You can't even add CSS directives to the <gallery> tag—presumably because it's defined as wikitext rather than as an extension to XHTML—so you have to wrap it in a <div> if you want to centre the text, for example, and even then you have no control over what text is formatted. You can't even put a <br> tag in an image caption. --Phil | Talk 09:34, Jan 17, 2005 (UTC)

Peculiar edit history problem in the John Kerry article

Is anyone else having trouble looking at the most recent diff in the John Kerry article? No matter which diff you check, it thinks the most recent edit is by Evercat. Navigate to the page history and try looking at any diff between the current revision and any previous revision.

This makes it very hard to detect and revert vandalism. The best workaround I can see is to make a tiny change to the most recent, potentially vandalized version, and then look at the diff between the 2nd last and last known good version. Peculiar. I have not seen this problem with any other article. Antandrus 23:57, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yup, it's been going on for a few days now; I assumed it was just a temporary glitch and would solve itsself, but apparently not. --fvw* 00:05, 2005 Jan 15 (UTC)
Here's a further clue. Although I have the most recent edit (as of this exact moment) it is not showing (top) on my contribs list. (Of course that clue will disappear as soon as the article is vandalized again.) Interesting. It's as though that edit by Evercat long ago got permanently tagged as (top). Antandrus 02:10, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)


I an not able to reproduce this problem; diffs to the current version display the current version at the moment as by Antandrus, with comment "rm more vandalism". (Tested [2], [3], [4], [5]) I also do see a "(top)" marker in your contribs list for that edit. Could you make screen captures of particular diff URLs as they display for you and point out exactly where it mentions Evercat, if it still does? Try also clearing your browser cache, in case a particular bad load somehow got stuck. --Brion 07:16, Jan 15, 2005 (UTC)
The problem seems to have resolved since yesterday; I now see diffs correctly. Curious. Thanks for checking, Brion. Antandrus 16:57, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia performance, searching and a Mozille plugin

Hi.

I think one reason causing Wikipedias slowness might be the search-plugin offered at mozilla.org, page http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/central.html#central-engines

The plugin/addon adds a search for en.wikipedia.org, much like the default search for Google. There's just one problem: the addon directs the query *directly* to Wikipedia's search engine, instead of first trying the "Go"-query. So, even if you know exectly where you're going, it goes throught the search-engine. What a waste of resources!

(For example if you e.g. submit a search for "Donald Duck", the addon searches whole Wikipedia for the page, instead of going directly where the user probably wants to go)

Perhaps someone should advise the people @ mozilla.org to change the addon to make a bit more sense. That is to submit a normal search instead of a whole site search - Wikipedia does this anyway if the article isn't found.


- Antti, from Finland.

Character Display

When I am viewing an article in Wikimedia/Wikipedia and it contains special characters (such as mathematical symbols or Asian language pages) what is display is the ⊂ character instead. How can I change this? I am using IE 6.0.2800.1106CO on the Windows 98 platform (heh, not by choice).

A specific example of this is the Set article. Under the category Subset this is what is displayed:

"... written A ⊆ B. If A is subset of B, and A is not equal to B, then A is called a proper subset of B, written A ⊂ B."

Unless I am mistaken, ⊂ should be something else.

Thank you, jtmendes jtmendes 02:17, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This is due to an editor with a different browser not checking how they display in IE, as they should. Drop a note on Wikipedia: Wikiproject Mathematics to remind everyone. Deco 11:17, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I have some problems with display of certain symbols when running Mozilla Firefox 1.0 on a Linux system (at least under KDE 3.3 if that makes a difference). <math>\emptyset</math>: and &empty;: ∅ should display two similar glyphs. However, between the Monobook skin, Firefox, and the font system, the second is rendered as the "AE" ligature. The font used with the classic skin seems to work fine. I suppose this is a font problem on my end, not a Wikipedia problem. I am not even sure how to figure out exactly what font Firefox is using or how to fix the problem. But, it's probably something that Wikipedians should be aware of. Maybe Monobook needs to use a different font that works more generally? Gwimpey 04:04, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)

Avoiding section duplication in articles... Mediawiki software should check and prevent

It is an all too common occurrence that sections within an article get duplicated. And this invariably happens in very long articles with hundreds of sections. For instance, Wikipedia:Reference desk has about 170 sections as of now, and when it gets duplicated it suddenly has 340 sections. This happened twice today (both times an anon IP).

I don't know if this is intentional vandalism or yet another software bug, but it's incredibly labor intensive to disentangle properly if people have gone on to edit the article further. The quick and dirty solution is just to throw out one half of the article, and too bad if people happened to make their edits in the wrong half.

First of all you have to plow through the history, trial-and-error one by one, to locate which edit caused the duplication. This is especially fun when the system performance is abysmal, as it usually is, so that each click requires a 60-second wait or more. Then you have to revert, and reapply the subsequent edits one by one.

Some partial solutions:

First of all, the history should indicate, for each revision, how much the size of the article changed as a + or − percentage. This would enable easily noticing a +100% change in the article size immediately (duplication). This would also enable noticing a −100% change (blanking vandalism).

Second, before saving an edit the software should verify that no section titles at the same level have the exact same name. This would prevent the duplication from ever being saved into the database in the first place.

-- Curps 02:43, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Section duplication is the effect of another bug: section editing in the presence of an edit conflict. I'm rather annoyed this hasn't been fixed yet. Deco 11:15, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yet more category weirdness

Okay, this one's got me bamboozled. The article Sogne fjord is listed in Category: Geography stubs. Trouble is, that "article" is simply a redirect to Sognefjorden - no article text body and no category tags. Any clues? Grutness|hello? 11:11, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

PS - the Sognefjorden talk page mentons bugs in a fairly convoluted page history - that may shed some light on the problem Grutness|hello?

Mikkalai created Sogne fjord seven times, that was the root of the problem. Repaired. -- Cyrius|✎ 03:41, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

"All Articles" List in single file?

I have done a good bit of hunting, and if I have missed some information resources, please believe that it is not for lack of trying.

Is there a single downloadable file containing the all-articles list that appears page by page as listed on the Special:Allpages page? As it stands, I know of no way to obtain such a list save tedious page scraping starting from that page, but I can't believe there is not a single file somewhere. I don't need instantaneously accurate lists (though that would be nice), just a reasonably up-to-date list.

While I'm asking things: I have discovered how to get an XML download of an individual article; but is there a single, straightforward description of how to convert the markup in the text of such an article? I have a copy of the PHP Output script, which I will review soon, and some editing-help material, but is there an actual "here's the markup meaning" file?

I apologize if these are naive questions, but I am new here.

Owlcroft 02:05, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

http://download.wikimedia.org/archives/en/all_titles_in_ns0.gz. HTH, Kate.

Thank you, Kate. That is it--but is it updated to a regular schedule? The copy there now is a week old. Is there any other version more frequently updated? Or is the current (at time of request) file available? Thanks again! Owlcroft 05:00, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I don't know of one. That one is updated whenever a database dump is run, which is roughly weekly (can be more or less depending on who's around to do it). Kate.

Appearance in Firefox screwed up

I've been using Firefox without any problems until today. Wikipedia loads with no frames, thus no sidebar, and no tabs. The formatting is all wrong and looks like old NSCA Mosaic-rendered text. But this doesn't happen in any of the other Wiki projects to which Wikipedia links. Those are all fine, and Wikipedia is fine in IE. In fact, I've had to add this post in IE because I couldn't load an edit box in Firefox. Anybody have any thoughts? TimothyPilgrim 04:08, Jan 17, 2005 (UTC)

Try hitting reload or even emptying your disk cache and restarting firefox: Sometimes something goes wrong with serving up the proper theme/stylesheet under high load I think. --fvw* 04:11, 2005 Jan 17 (UTC)
Sure enough, it was that simple. Thanks for the tip. I should've tried it first, but I'm in a half-awake state after a long day. :) TimothyPilgrim 04:30, Jan 17, 2005 (UTC)

Sorry- we have a problem...

Sorry- we have a problem...
The wikimedia web server didn't return any response to your request.
To get information on what's going on you can visit #wikipedia.
An "offsite" status page is hosted on OpenFacts.

I'm long familiar with this problem...we all are.

Painfully.

But today it's grown geometrically worse. At times I get the error more often than a success.

But I'm not posting just to report that. The real problem is that, after refreshing several times in a row in response to that message, I've actually had all of my refreshes show up as separate edits.

So the entry is being made, THEN the error page is coming up anyway.

I was making a new Talk entry, and the entry showed up four times.

I think people need to be warned that this can happen, perhaps some comment included in that error message above. Kaz 18:03, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Slowness

Lately the site is too slow to use. Whats going on? Also, editing gives the above mentioned "server didn't return any response to your request" error. Bensaccount 19:25, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

All I can do is give up. <KF> 21:20, Jan 17, 2005 (UTC)

Thorny problem

Another problem from me I'm afraid. I was just mailed by someone annoyed that I'd changed a thorn-character 9as in Icelandic script) to <THORN>. Seems that whenever I try to edit a page with one of those characters, it is automatically saved as <THORN> rather than as the character it is meant to be. Any clues? If it's any help I'm using IE 5.2 (I know, I know...) Grutness|hello? 23:26, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Does the page have the actual character or one of the entities (ie. &thorn; and &THORN;)? The thorn characters are defined as unsafe and should always be entered as an entity. —Mike 05:39, Jan 18, 2005 (UTC)
Good question. Currently, neither... but I'll go and fix it now I know how! Grutness|hello? (PS - Yup - that was the problem. It's fixed now)

Articles getting chopped off

With the slowness of the system I've had saves fail in miserable ways, with articles getting chopped off partway through and losing their latter portions. And the system is dead enough that, for a long article, I just don't seem to be able to get the revert to take. I've been trying for half an hour to revert and thereby restore the latter part of Abraham Goldfaden, but the more general message to all is to look out for this happening to you, becuase it is subtle: you'll think your save worked, and the upper part of the article (probably all you will see) will look just fine. -- Jmabel | Talk 02:42, Jan 18, 2005 (UTC)

I finally saved it, but it took about 10 tries. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:50, Jan 18, 2005 (UTC)
There also seems to be a bug that causes page duplication--happened to me with San Jose, California, and to someone else with San Francisco, California. I think these had to do with inserting the whole article into a section while doing a section edit that results in an edit conflict. Niteowlneils 22:36, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Live RC

What's up with the Live Recent Changes? It isn't getting a feed, no changes are coming through. --fvw* 18:22, 2005 Jan 18 (UTC)

  • Never mind, fixed. Apparantly suda, the database slave it was running off, was down. --fvw* 20:14, 2005 Jan 18 (UTC)
  • Where is live RC? I thought it was gone for good. - RedWordSmith 22:00, Jan 19, 2005 (UTC)
    • Nope, live RC never went anywhere, just kate's tools. There's a link at the top of WP:RC, it's at [6]. --fvw* 22:31, 2005 Jan 19 (UTC)

What's happening to Wikipedia?

Almost every time I try to save an edit, it sits around doing nothing for several minutes, then finally throws up the following: 

Sorry- we have a problem...
The wikimedia web server didn't return any response to your request.
To get information on what's going on you can visit #wikipedia.
An "offsite" status page is hosted on OpenFacts. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Generated Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:12:13 GMT by maurus.wikimedia.org (squid/2.5.STABLE4-20040219.wp20050114.icpfix.nortt.S7)

Sometimes I have to try saving a page 20-30 times or more before it finally condescends to saving the edit instead of throwing up this message; sometimes when using the back button my edit is still there in the edit box, other times it is lost. Sometimes instead of doing the edit, half the article disappears (see e.g. the page history for pine nut) instead, requiring reverting. This has been going on for a week or ten days now. It is worst (by far) from mid afternoon to late evening UTC, but happens at all times of the day. What the f*** is going on, and is anything being done to solve the problem? At the present rate, it just isn't going to be worth attempting any more edits at all, given the time it wastes waiting, waiting and waiting. Is there anything I can do to send a stronger signal to wikipedia to improve the chances of the edit working (e.g. pressing the 'save page' button repeatedly? harder??)? - MPF 21:38, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yea, almost too slow to be a viable thing. I've found vandalism I cant revert because I cant save. frusterating. Have to put it on my watchlist and hope to fix it later. I dont expect this to save by the way... --DanielCD 21:41, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I find that sometimes it comes back with this message even though the page save has worked. I alternate between retrying the save and loading the page history to see if it worked or not. I have never lost the text by hitting Back, or seen page text lost. — PhilHibbs | talk 13:40, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It's a really deadly combination of problems. The one that chops off the bottom of an article is nasty, because the top of the article looks fine and you may have no idea what happened. Combined with the other problem (page is really saved, but you get an error message) it means that there is no consistent relationship either way between whether it looks like the page was saved and whether it really was! So we get people who saved successfully (but don't know it) trying again and then failing: that is, their first edit was (invisibly) OK, then they mess it up trying to "fix" it. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:17, Jan 19, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks; nice to know I'm not the only one affected. Anyone know why it is happening, and if (or when) it can be solved? (PS sorry about forgetting the end big slash in the header!!) - MPF 21:39, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Genrally speaking, I find refreshing on the error page and resubmitting (in IE6) brings me back to a point where I can save again. Worth a try. Filiocht 10:43, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

This seems to have been fixed. Big thank you, mucho gracias, and merci beaucoup to whoever fixed it. Niteowlneils 21:57, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I am still having more-than-occasional problems saving long articles. I normally use Firefox. Much though I hate to say it, I've tried experimenting with IE and do not seem to have the same problem there, at least not on the first couple of attempts. Has anyone else had a similar experience? -- Jmabel | Talk 18:54, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

what is the difference between Go and Search? Oatee 12:08, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The Go button directly takes you to an article (if it exists). Clicking on the search button will produce a list of articles that contain the text you searched for. For eg. if you type "abcd"" and click on go, you will be taken to ABCD. If you click on Search, you will get a list of articles containing "ABCD" or "abcd". If the article doesn't exist, in case of Go button, you will be prompted to create one or put up a request. In case of search button, you will be given the options to search Wikipedia using Yahoo! and Google. utcursch 12:28, Jan 19, 2005 (UTC)
FWIW, the Yahoo and Google searches are only offerred when Wikipedia real-time search is disabled (it is disabled regularly when it impedes performance. Niteowlneils 21:55, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Strange bug with editing sections

Check out this diff: [7]

I clicked on the edit link for the History section, but it treated what I was saving as though I was saving the whole article. At the time, it's also not showing an earlier edit I made to the whole page (due to the replication bug), so it may have thought I was still editing the whole page. I guess I'll only use the main edit link for now. --SPUI 22:39, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I've been bitten when simultaneously editing two sections of one page in separate browser windows. The second submit wipes out changes from the first one, even though the sections don't intersect. —Michael Z. 01:22, 2005 Jan 21 (UTC)
Did you have an edit conflict with someone? That's when I've seen the whole article saved as a section within itself (seems to be a new bug, as I've never run into it before v1.4)? Niteowlneils 21:39, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I suggest changing the HTML generation so that it implements Google's Preventing comment spam idea. This just means that when someone types: 

[http://www.spammer.com a link like this]

Instead of generating: 

<a href="http://www.spammer.com">a link like this</a>

WikiMedia should generate: 

<a href="http://www.spammer.com" rel="nofollow">a link like this</a>

While this doesn't eliminate spam, it'll help eliminate one of the incentives for spamming Wikipedia, because such pages won't have their rankings increased.

-- Dwheeler 00:18, 2005 Jan 20 (UTC)

This exact suggestion was made at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Stopping_Link_Spam_.2F_Comment_Spam. Several of us disagree with it, for reasons given there. I suggest that rather than discuss it in two places, we continue discussion there. -- Jmabel | Talk 00:39, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

It is currently turned on. If anyone reading this page doesn't like that, please go to the other page and comment. —Ben Brockert (42) 02:31, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)
New spot to discuss: m:Meta:Nofollow. —Ben Brockert (42) 05:39, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

Bug: Bad end tags within templates

There seems to be a bug with the tables. When I was browsing and looked up Hydrofluoric acid, at the beginning of the article was the note , and at the text of the article was squeezed into a column directly above the data table. Similar investigation showed that this is now affecting all articles under the with the chemical infobox. I am unable to fix it. User:Ingoolemo/Sig 08:16, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I am experiencing the same problem across multiple pages. It seems to affect templates. —Lowellian (talk) 08:28, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)
To clarify, normally invisible end tags are showing up as text within templates. —Lowellian (talk) 08:38, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

Well, I've sorted that one by converting it to Wiki markup. Can you give some other examples? (This wasn't a template, just a table.) Noisy | Talk 10:09, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

A different database error

I hadn't been reporting this because I though it was the standard database error, but to my untrained eye it looks unrelated to the current Wiki go-slow. A couple of articles (namely Vicente López Partido, Vila de São Sebastião, and Viseu) have all returned the following: 

A database error has occurred
Query: SELECT * FROM `ipblocks` WHERE ipb_user=117878 
Function: Block::load
Error: 1142 select command denied to user: '[email protected]' for table 'ipblocks' (207.142.131.200)

Apologies if it is part of the same problem, but it looks like completely different messages to me, and it's only these three articles - all others are working fine. Grutness|hello? 11:31, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Fixed it myself - it only happened when going from Category:Geography stubs to the pages. Got to the pages from a different direction and replaced the geo-stubs with identical ones. They seem to work fine now. weird. Grutness|hello? 22:56, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Image problems

For some reason on my computer images are refusing to download, either the thumbnails or the full images.

It says at the bottom something along the lines of "Uploading (2 items)/monobook/skins" but nothing actually loads. I've noticed this problem on and off for several days now.

Also a few days ago I re-uploaded a larger versions of an image that was already there (Here}, although the image uploaded it hasn't registered it on the history, and it hasn't automatically thumbnailed it to 800X600px, I've noticed this on several other pictures I've uploaded in the last few days.

Is anyone else having this problem?, what's causing it/can be done about it. G-Man 22:52, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Subject/headline

When in "(comment)" mode, or "add section" edit mode, which I am in right now, it should render the section title as well when you push preview. - Omegatron 00:47, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)

Terrible grey edit fields in Safari

Hey, who made the edit field and edit summary field grey? Way less contrast and harder on the eyes, while serving no discernible purpose. Please change it back! —Michael Z. 01:24, 2005 Jan 21 (UTC)

Am I the only one seeing this? As of today, my edit textarea, edit summary input field, and search input field look like they have background:#ddd; applied to them, instead of being white (although the Wikipedia login fields remain white). Only in monobook—the other skins still have white fields. I see this in Safari/Mac while logged in or not, but in Firefox the fields are still white.

I can't find the new rule in any of Wikipedia's style sheets, and I can't override it in my user monobook.css. Editing text on this medium grey field is infuriating; please help! —Michael Z. 2005-01-21 08:08Z

Can't find it at all in any of the CSS files. Does Safari have settings for styling of forms? Maybe you set those, and for some reason only in monobook it applies. You could try something like
textarea {color: black !important; background: white !important;}
to reset it. PS: your sig updates its time on each edit, including those by others, I doubt that is as intended. User:Anárion/sig 07:54, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Safari doesn't have any such settings. I tried selectors like that, and more specific ones like #editform textarea and textarea [name="wpTextbox1"], but still no dice.
Oops on my new sig. I thought those values would be substituted. —Michael Z. 08:08, 2005 Jan 21 (UTC)
TomG removed the form button styling from the MonoBook css file. Gabriel Wicke 15:42, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Not form buttons, form fields. Textareas and text inputs. I've rebooted my machine, and they're still grey. If I cancel a page load before it's quite finished, they are white even though most of the monobook.css styling is applied, so it must be caused by either
  • a javascript that's changing styles after the page loads.
  • a selector in a style sheet that's imported after monobook.css.
  • a selector near the end of a big style sheet.
There's no User:TomG. Do you mean User:Tom-? —Michael Z. 2005-01-21 17:22Z
Sorry, misunderstood you then (obviously didn't read carefully). -- Gabriel Wicke 00:30, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Looks like User:Tom-'s been editing the style sheets, and neither monobook/main.css nor monobook.css validates. I've left him a message.

I am seeing this also, and I also Hate it. Please fix, my eyes are bad enough as it is ;-) Paul August ☎ 18:22, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)

So I'm not insane. Hallelujah! —Michael Z. 2005-01-21 18:31Z
We can't comment on your sanity, but we can say you aren't the only one! I first noticed it last night. —Mike 02:19, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)
I'm looking into this. Tom- 23:10, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The boxes from hell

This is a general observation... putting stuff in unformatted boxes is notorious for making pages not 800x600 compliant eg:(Wikipedia_talk:Footnotes). Can someone enable wrapping in these boxes; or does that contradict their purpose of having no formatting? - RoyBoy [∞] 03:45, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

You mean pre boxes? like
this and this and this
and this?
I suggested putting those in autoscroll boxes, but nobody liked the idea, I guess. - Omegatron 05:10, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Monobook.css#pre_autoflow
Those are HTML <pre> elements, for preformatted text, and are supposed to appear exactly as entered. The problem is, of course, when someone puts in text that's not preformatted.
What if they were formatted with "width:95%; overflow:hidden;"? Then someone would quickly notice if the text needs to be wrapped, and they would never force the page larger than the viewport. Similar idea to autoscroll, but I would find a scrollbar visually obtrusive. Here's an actual example of text I found in a pre block:
3. It shall be lawful for the Queen, by and with the Advice of Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, to declare by Proclamation that, on and after the passing of this Act, the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick shall form and be One Dominion under the Name of Canada; and on and after that Day those Three Provinces shall form and be One Dominion under that Name accordingly.(4) 

4. Unless it is otherwise expressed or implied, the Name Canada shall be taken to mean Canada as constituted under this Act.(5)
And here it is hard wrapped to 72 columns. Just fits in an 800px wide window:
3. It shall be lawful for the Queen, by and with the Advice of Her
   Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, to declare by Proclamation
   that, on and after the passing of this Act, the Provinces of Canada,
   Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick shall form and be One Dominion under
   the Name of Canada; and on and after that Day those Three Provinces
   shall form and be One Dominion under that Name accordingly.(4)

4. Unless it is otherwise expressed or implied, the Name Canada shall be
   taken to mean Canada as constituted under this Act.(5)
—Michael Z.
Nice idea, but not everyone's using an 800px window. People with 1280px windows would edit something and it would look fine for them, but be unreadable for people with smaller browser windows. What's more, the text width depends on fonts, font settings, and other local configuration issues, so it might get copped off for one editor at 800px while looking great to another who is also at 800px. I'm afraid this isn't the solution. --fvw* 07:01, 2005 Jan 21 (UTC)
So how is that different from what we have now, except that no one will have to scroll back and forth 5 screens to read some text? PRE text will always have a fixed width, and if it's too wide then someone will find it and make it narrower, a sort of evolutionary "survival of the short enough". In other words, a long PRE block can only break itself, and not the whole page. —Michael Z.
That's the point of the autoscroll / overflow:auto. The entire page maintains its normal width, the preformatted text maintains its preformattedness, and it is still accessible in its entirety. I think the overflow:auto is the best solution, but does not work nicely in IE. Still, it could be added to the css and make it nicer for some users. Preformatted text shouldn't wrap, ever. That's the whole point of being preformatted. If text needs to be displayed in monospace, but wrappable, it should not be in pre tags. - Omegatron 16:35, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)
The browser's scrollbar is always at the bottom of the screen and much more comfortable, especially if there are multiple overflowing boxes close to each other. It allows the user to scroll away the sidebar which isn't possible if inline scrollbars are forced. There are good reasons why browsers don't show scrollbars for pre's inline, please don't mess with it! -- Gabriel Wicke 00:38, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I don't see these good reasons, but ok. If you like it that way. I much prefer an individual scrollbar for the occasional preformatted sections that overshoot the page, so I'm not scrolling my entire browser window while reading, and then trying to find my place again afterwards. Not to mention that the dashed lines walk right over the text in Firefox, which is ugly. Regardless, for people who want individual scrollbars and use a browser besides IE, just add
/* put scrollbar on pre sections instead of ugly cutoff/overlap in firefox */
pre { overflow: auto; }
to your User:username/monobook.css . By the way, this is the way it is done in several forums (such as http://www.linuxquestions.org), to handle preformatted code in threads, which is where I got the idea. - Omegatron 02:20, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)
In the current case, reading the misformatted text is hard for some people. In the case you propose, reading the text is impossible for some people. Sounds like a regression to me. (What's more, the warning function of text being chopped off is just as strong or weak as the warning function of having a horizontal scrollbar. Both are rather hard to miss and very annoying, I doubt many people who would ignore the latter wouldn't ignore the former too). --fvw* 07:15, 2005 Jan 21 (UTC)
Whe can use pre {white-space: pre-wrap;} for modern browsers (pre {white-space: -moz-pre-wrap;} for Mozilla, IIRC). This will cause intelligent wrapping of pre boxes for people using very low resolutions. MSIE users should upgrade to a browser which is not based on six years old code. User:Anárion/sig 07:59, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Fvw, you're right, it would be a bit more disruptive especially for non-editors, but if a user actually wanted to read the text, instead of spending 10 seconds scrolling horizontally, they may be prompted to take 30 seconds and improve the text.
Anárion, pre-wrap doesn't work in Safari yet, unfortunately, but they have been adding CSS 2 properties regularly. The following block has white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; white-space:pre-wrap; applied. Works nicely in Firefox. Hallelujah to exterminating MSIE/Win! —Michael Z. 2005-01-21 16:44Z
3. It shall be lawful for the Queen, by and with the Advice of Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, to declare by Proclamation that, on and after the passing of this Act, the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick shall form and be One Dominion under the Name of Canada; and on and after that Day those Three Provinces shall form and be One Dominion under that Name accordingly.(4) 

4. Unless it is otherwise expressed or implied, the Name Canada shall be taken to mean Canada as constituted under this Act.(5)
And just for reference, here's a scrolling PRE block:
3. It shall be lawful for the Queen, by and with the Advice of Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, to declare by Proclamation that, on and after the passing of this Act, the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick shall form and be One Dominion under the Name of Canada; and on and after that Day those Three Provinces shall form and be One Dominion under that Name accordingly.(4) 

4. Unless it is otherwise expressed or implied, the Name Canada shall be taken to mean Canada as constituted under this Act.(5)
Wow, okay I'm confused... but essentially its because CSS2 hasn't been implemented yet in browsers? - RoyBoy [∞] 04:51, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Saving fast

Why is page saving suddenly 10 times faster than it usually is? And why haven't I gotten a single deadlock in the last 18 hours? This is unacceptable, I loved those deadlocks. Does anyone know what's going on? This lack of communication between the developers and me personally is a problem that seriously needs to be rectified. -- Anon

  • Hahaha. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 07:41, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Hehe, it is pretty pleasant now, shame it's bedtime. I wouldn't have called the situation 18 hours ago "pleasant" though. Still, if this is not just one of those brief oases of excellent response times you insist on taunting us with, well done! --fvw* 07:42, 2005 Jan 21 (UTC)
    • I agree with fvw, if they're going to fix one problem, they may as well have the decency to fix every other problem simulataneously. Now it's just a non-sensical mish-mash of problems and the absence thereof. -- Anon
      • These comments just go to show you that, really, m:anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles. Also, we need to make the definition of "article" clearer, so that it includes everything. And instead of "anonymous", I would prefer "annoying". But those are minor modifications we can make after establishing the policy. JRM 13:23, 2005 Jan 21 (UTC)
        • No one should ever be censored simply because someone finds them 'annoying'. This shouldn't become a place where only the accepted 'group think' is allowed.  :-) —Mike 02:31, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

British users going through Paris squids

Starting from today, British users of the en: wiki will be using caches located near Paris, France (which already serve English, French and multimedia content to users in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland). This should improve performance a lot for anonymous users browsing content (especially for frequently accessed content), and improve the situation somewhat for logged-in users. David.Monniaux 14:03, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Convert "--" to em-dash

It would make editing articles a little easier if we could just type "--" whenever we want to place an "—" (em-dash). Just a thought. --Stevietheman 16:05, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

There was discussion about this. Someone wrote a script or whatever that automatically converted them, and it didn't work well and the idea was scrapped. I wish it were easier to find discussions... - Omegatron 16:30, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dashes). —Korath (Talk) 18:15, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)
I was meaning in terms of ongoing edits, e.g., if I type ~~~~ it will sign my name with a timestamp. I was thinking that if I type two hyphens together, the Wikipedia would automatically display it as an em-dash. --Stevietheman 06:53, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I'm aware. :) It's discussed there, at length. (If you're suggesting it just convert -- for new edits, this'll break whenever a page with -- in it is edited.) —Korath (Talk) 07:15, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)
But why would you ever have two hyphens ("--") if you didn't mean to type a dash? All I can think of is "----" for a horizontal rule, but that's okay as long as the code converts HRs before dashes. If you absolutely need "--" for some unusual example, just put <nowiki> tags around it. —Michael Z. 2005-01-22 17:20 Z
Yeah. Whatever happened to this? I looked at the discussion, and it seems it was just forgotten about. So what if it messed up the table markup? That is well defined markup. Program around it. Is there anything else it would conflict with? I don't see any other time that --, ---, and ---- would be used except en dashes, em dashes, and horizontal lines. - Omegatron 18:04, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)
I thought the discussion got off-track with the idea of "--" -> en-dash and "---" -> em-dash. I honestly don't care if a regular hyphen is used in date ranges, as there is hardly any visual difference between a hyphen and an en-dash. Further, I believe most people intend to use the equivalent of an em-dash when they type two contiguous hyphens. --Stevietheman 19:20, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)
HTML comments. —Ben Brockert (42) 04:27, Jan 23, 2005 (UTC)
While this discussion should probably be kept to the page it's on already (it's amazing how much discussion this tiny issue has generated), I think it's ridiculous to suppose there's some legitimate use for the double-dash that can't be automatically detected in almost all cases. In particular, neither our parsers nor our programmers are dumb enough to automatically convert the double-dash inside HTML comments into mdashes. Deco 04:43, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Another proposal for www.wikipedia.org portal

Please come look and comment and improve on an idea I had for the multilingual portal at www.wikipedia.org -- see Catherine's design. Here's a mockup:

portal proposal
portal proposal

I'd really appreciate some feedback (and help with getting the graphics properly transparent and all). Thanks! Catherine\talk 06:47, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

  • I really, REALLY like your design. Especially when compared to what's currently the portal page. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 18:06, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • I like it a lot. There would be no sidebar, right? - Omegatron 18:08, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)
  • Looks awesome! --Stevietheman 19:13, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • I like it a lot Catherine ! Very neat :-) SweetLittleFluffyThing
  • Looks like a proper entry page/cover of a book rather than a hack on monobook. Love it. --BesigedB (talk) 23:21, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • I like it a lot. However, this design does not work with some khtml-based browsers (Konqueror, though it might work with very recent versions of it, and perhaps Safari). Perhaps an image map would be safer. David.Monniaux 23:28, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)
    • It works okay (now) for me with Konqueror 3.2.2. Alan Barrett has changed a bunch of the CSS - can you try again with your khtml browser and see if he's fixed things for it too? -- John Fader 15:37, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)
      • Does not work with Konqueror 3.1, really horrible results. David.Monniaux 21:41, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)
    • No image map for text, please! A table would be preferable to that, but hopefully the CSS can work in all the modern browsers plus MSIE/Win. —Michael Z. 2005-01-23 19:00 Z
      • Have you tested with Safari? I do not see how a table would help - for me, the image map would just be for the logo and 6 texts around. David.Monniaux 21:41, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • That's really nice. The only thing I would consider is left aligning the "10,000 - 50,000 articles" titles and text below the top part. Beautiful! --Alterego 23:34, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)
  • Really cool-looking, although it perhaps de-emphasizes the Littlepedias (no differently than the current design does). Deco 04:40, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Excellent. Can I suggest you add "background:white;" to the styles for the names surrounding the globe - this way, when the browser window is so narrow that these guys must overlap the globe, they're still legible (sure, it's ugly, but marginally less so than without the background specification). -- John Fader 04:50, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Just to chime in - I love it too :) →Raul654 07:53, Jan 23, 2005 (UTC)
  • Me too ;-) And even table-free! -- Gabriel Wicke 11:51, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Beautiful!User:Pt/sig 13:26, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Wow! :ChrisG 21:47, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • That's a beauty. Awesome! — Gwalla | Talk 02:05, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Very classy - lets go for it Apwoolrich 08:49, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
  • Gods Of - aherm... I mean, definitely very impressive. I would suggest adopting at least something like this. Works at least in the Konqueror 3.2.0 I am using - Skysmith 11:51, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

a section edit at the intro para

i guess that would be helpful. sometimes i want to modify the intro para, but i have to load the whole article. just think if the article's long enough and the speed's sucking enough...... --User:Yacht (talk) 06:11, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

Yes yes! Very good idea. - Omegatron 14:52, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)
Yes, I would appreciate that too. For some reason I feel more secure if I'm just editing a section. But I hear that editing the whole article is faster than just a section. Go figure. —Michael Z. 2005-01-22 16:54 Z
Workaround: open the first section, and then change &section=1 to &section=0 in the address bar of your web browser as here. User:Anárion/sig 17:02, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, that's a workaround but it should still be implemented. - Omegatron 17:44, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)
I have thought about that several times. Such a feature would be very helpful.User:Pt/sig 22:19, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Shell

hello,

hello. m new to unix. could anybody tell me why do we always boot up in KDE when we start the Fedora. Even if we make bash shell as a default shell, it is always seen when we open the terminal session.

hi. in the apple menu, select system preferences. then click accounts, and choose the startup items tab. uncheck KDE and close the window. And it's a good idea to restart while holding the clover and option keys, to rebuild the desktop.
KDE has an apple menu? Doesn't Apple Computer have that trademarked? — Gwalla | Talk 17:52, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Just a little joke for old Mac users. I found it amusing that someone was asking for operating system support here. —Michael Z. 2005-01-22 16:54 Z

Stub threshold

Is there any news on the old stub threshold/purple link feature? Is it coming back? Tuf-Kat 03:19, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

  • I didn't know it was gone. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 03:58, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
    • It's been gone for me since the 1.4 upgrade. Skin issue maybe? Antandrus 04:04, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Welcome templates

I'm just wondering: I just created a couple of welcome templates for new users and placed them in my username subspace - {{User:Asbestos/Welcome}} and {{User:Asbestos/Welcome2}}. This seems to work fine. However, I noticed that some other users seem to have their personal welcome template in Wikipedia's template space, e.g. Template:Infrog welcome. Which is standard usage? Does it make a difference? And can just anyone put just anything in WP's template space? Thanks! — Asbestos | Talk 11:08, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

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